As part of the speech, the US health secretary, Alex Azar, suggested drug companies should be required to disclose pharmaceutical prices in advertisements as an incentive to set lower prices.

Along with the speech, the president released a “” to lower drug prices. However, many proposals had already been made public in the administration’s budget and most were technical rule changes which can be accomplished without Congress. Drug policy analysts said most the proposals would be unlikely to “”. Following Trump’s speech, health .

The administration’s blueprint also proposed lifting the pharmacist “gag” rule, so pharmacists can tell consumers when a drug is cheaper without their health insurance. Such provisions are written into contracts between pharmacists and benefit managers, who act as middlemen between the consumer and the health plan.

Trump criticized drug industry lobbying and cheaper prices European nations pay for drugs. He said his administration would “derail the gravy train for special interests” and “end Obamacare’s twisted incentives that encourage higher drug prices”.

The comments come days after it was revealed Swiss drug company Novartis paid Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, $1.2m to “advise” executives. Before becoming Trump’s health secretary, Azar was a who was criticized for raising the price of insulin at Eli Lilly.

Robert Mueller investigating payments to Michael Cohen, Swiss drug giant says Read moreTrump campaigned on a promise to let Medicare, a public health insurance program for the elderly, negotiate bulk discounts for drugs, similar to how European countries secure discounts on drugs. The promise was a rare subject of agreement between Democrats and Trump, who pledged to help him pass such a proposal.

However, after more than a year of virtual silence on the subject, Trump did not address that promise in his speech. The first indication Trump would drop the campaign promise came days after he was inaugurated, following a meeting with pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Trump also argued that foreign countries should pay more for drugs, but did not address how that would lower drug prices in America.

“In some cases, medicine that costs a few dollars in a foreign country costs hundreds of dollars in America for the same pill, with the same ingredients, in the same package, made in the same plant,” said Trump. “It’s unfair and it’s ridiculous, and it’s not going to happen any longer.”

“The speech itself did not include significant new info that was not present in the president’s budget blueprint, the CEA white paper, or the releases issued by admin members over the past few weeks,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug policy expert and associate law professor at Washington University in Missouri.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he couldn’t remember whether he had discussed the Russia investigation with his father.

That’s according to transcripts of his interview with the panel last year. The committee on Wednesday released more than 1,800 pages of transcripts of interviews with Trump’s son and others who met with a Russian attorney at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election.

Trump Jr. deflected multiple questions during the interview, including whether he discussed the Russia probe with his father.

According to the transcripts, Trump Jr. also said he didn’t think there was anything wrong with attending the Trump Tower meeting in which he was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The meeting is under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The "I don't remember" defence is just so shitty as it's neither an admission of guilt or innocence. I really hope the entire family go down and take Fox News with them kicking and screaming about how the Dark State screwed them and how this is all Hillary Clinton's fault somehow. If Trump does indeed survive for a full 8 years the state of the US media at the end is going to be woeful as I honestly think most of the people now opposing him will have just had enough of the completely transparent bullshit that his fans just seem absolutely fine with no matter how much they get screwed by his policies that are designed with only Trump's enrichment in mind.

jiggles wrote:Nobody with a VR headset is going to be using it regularly this time next year, let alone in 4 years time.

A law-enforcement official released the documents after finding that additional suspicious transactions did not appear in a government database.

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”

Seven former government officials and other experts familiar with the Treasury Department’s fincen database expressed varying levels of concern about the missing reports. Some speculated that fincen may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. One called the possibility “explosive.” A record-retention policy on fincen’s Web site notes that false documents or those “deemed highly sensitive” and “requiring strict limitations on access” may be transferred out of its master file. Nevertheless, a former prosecutor who spent years working with the fincen database said that she knew of no mechanism for restricting access to sars. She speculated that fincen may have taken the extraordinary step of restricting access “because of the highly sensitive nature of a potential investigation. It may be that someone reached out to fincen to ask to limit disclosure of certain sars related to an investigation, whether it was the special counsel or the Southern District of New York.”

I'd call Trump an evil genius for managing to become the President despite being shady as strawberry float but I think that really over estimates his abilities. How the strawberry float did we end up here?

100 years from now people studying history are going to be amazed this is our reality.

jiggles wrote:Nobody with a VR headset is going to be using it regularly this time next year, let alone in 4 years time.

Peter Crisp wrote:I'd call Trump an evil genius for managing to become the President despite being shady as strawberry float but I think that really over estimates his abilities. How the strawberry float did we end up here?

100 years from now people studying history are going to be amazed this is our reality.

Peter Crisp wrote:I'd call Trump an evil genius for managing to become the President despite being shady as strawberry float but I think that really over estimates his abilities. How the strawberry float did we end up here?

100 years from now people studying history are going to be amazed this is our reality.